You Might Just Find
by Malvolia
Summary: Molly's connection to Sherlock isn't pointless, after all...or even completely one-sided. It might just be what they both need. Set during and just after Series Two, mostly around the events of 'The Reichenbach Fall'. Latest chapter: 'Goodbye'. Complete.
1. Taste

She could kick herself for having such rubbish taste in men, except that kicking herself would be redundant after encounters with Sherlock.

"You always say such horrible things," she blurts. "Every time. _Always_. Always…."

If there is one thing she has learned about him, it's that, for the truly _human_ things, subtlety has absolutely no chance at making it through. And she wouldn't have said something like that a few years back, when this odd duck with a penchant for dark clothing and abusing corpses weaseled his way into her lab, her morgue, and unintentionally, her heart. Back then, she was too in awe of him to speak her mind to his face, although perhaps some of the abused corpses heard a bit more of Sherlock than they would have wanted.

So she's grown because of him, really, and that isn't bad.

He begins to turn away, but turns back. "I am sorry," he says, staring at the floor. "Forgive me." He moves in slowly. "Merry Christmas, Molly Hooper." He kisses her cheek.

So maybe he is growing, too.

He is clever, and he could have used that cleverness to become one of the Moriartys of the world, but he uses it to stop them, instead. No matter what Donovan thinks, Molly is sure he would never cross that line. She's talked to John, who likes to share his "look, he's human" anecdotes about the great detective, but that isn't how she knows. Unlike Sherlock, she can't rattle off how she knows things.

There's something to be said about knowing, deep down, that your taste in men isn't so rubbish after all; something about choosing to accept what is given to you and not to yearn for what isn't. She walks taller than she did before she met him.

This is one of the things she knows, without knowing how: he could never love her, and she could never love anyone else.

It feels almost like having something in common.


	2. Name

He called her John, once, and at the time she was hurt that he couldn't even remember her when she was standing two feet away from him. How many times had they been standing there together, before he met John, and yet it's his name that comes out of Sherlock's mouth most readily.

"I've replaced the skull," John told her early on, but that doesn't make it much better, because it just gives an empty skull priority of place over her.

She was hurt, but she had gotten used to that dull ache from her interactions with Sherlock, and she found that it got easier to deal with as time went on. Some part of her, sometimes, was close to laughing, because their relationship would be almost farce if it weren't tragic, and there are days, even if he doesn't look at her, even in the weeks in which he doesn't come by at all, when it isn't tragic.

She confronts him with deductions of her own, and he starts to try to care, and she lets him know it's okay. That he can't remember she's there, that he can't think of any reason he might need her, even that he calls her John…it's all okay.

After he—afterwards, she thinks of that moment again and it doesn't seem so hurtful, after all, being interchangeable with his best friend in the world.


	3. Mission

"What do you need?" she asks, and though she'd dreamed of him coming to her in the darkness she had never imagined feeling so serene, so ready, so capable.

"You."

"You can have me." She is fully aware that the partnering he has in mind is mental, not physical. Which, considering the man himself, makes the moment more potent than her dreams.

"Tomorrow you will perform an autopsy on one of two bodies. If it is me"—she gasps, but nods—"you will go into my right trouser pocket and reclaim the spare key you are about to give me—hopefully it won't have fallen out, but if it has you can claim you dropped it—that's if the subject comes up, although I doubt anybody would suspect me of being in possession of the key to your flat, so likely it won't—and if it is _not_ me, I will see you when you arrive home. Either way, you are to identify the body as mine. Now, listen very carefully to this next part, because if there is to be any chance at all of it _not_ being me…."

He rattles on until her head whirls and she leans back against the door. "You want people to think you're…you're dead?"

His lips tighten. "Yes, Molly, that would sum it up."

The trace of his usual impatience clears her mind, and she rummages in her purse for her spare key. "I'm going to have to lie to lots of people and I don't. I mean, I'm not good at it. It's like you said. Conversation…it's not my area."

"I'll teach you."

"It's not really your area, either, is it?"

"To lie."

"Ah. Well, what about…"

He grabs her by the shoulders and spins her around to face the door. "We'll go over all of this later, if in fact it becomes necessary to do so. In the meantime, go home, go about your business, and keep your mobile handy."

"If it...if it _is _you, they won't call _me_ to do the autopsy."

"Why not?"

"Because you…I…." She sighs. "I'll stay close."

It isn't worth trying to explain.


	4. Murder

She arrives on the scene suitably panicked, scouring the sidewalk for any sign of a flash of metal. It would have seemed strange to them, her insistence to be the one to perform the autopsy against their protests that they could find someone else, if it weren't for the same reason they offered the protests to begin with: her regard for Sherlock had been one of the least-kept secrets in London. The real difficulty is in keeping John out of the room, but she doesn't have to lie, she only has to tell the truth.

"Please, John," she says. "It's the one thing I can do for him."

The army doctor must be even more shaken up than she had imagined he would be, because she doesn't need to come up with a second protest.

She checks the victim's pocket on a nervous impulse and finds no key. There really hadn't been a need for her to check. The man on the table is several inches shorter than Sherlock, and his hair is straight—she'll have to curl it, and she's glad again for her obsession with the consulting detective because otherwise she might not have thought to bring her curling tongs.

Calm and clinical, she artfully disguises the face and head as she works to obscure both their features and any trace of the obviously fatal bullet wound. She remembers all the times she watched Sherlock lay into corpses and has the fleeting thought that he'd be proud of her efforts. Pleased, at any rate.

It is late and the halls are dim when she completes her report. She has submitted so many death certificates, she's lost count, but she's never written one up on a friend before. "Impact trauma in consequence of fall from great height," she types as the cause of death, and her hand shakes as she signs her name.

She brings a copy home to her flat, and her breath comes ragged and shuddering as the tension of the last twenty-four hours breaks over her. Her eyes are bloodshot and her nose swollen, and she has never been a pretty crier, but then he would never have been fooled anyway. Besides, for once she isn't worried that he might observe something she didn't even want him to see.

"It's done, then," he says solemnly, turning the page over and over in his long fingers.

She doesn't tell him she feels like she has killed him herself.

For once, he seems to know without having to be told.


	5. Training

In the week following Sherlock's supposed suicide, Molly takes personal leave and holes up in her flat with a dead man who answers back. "I just need some time away," she tells her supervisor, who says she was expecting as much and grants the leave request immediately. Which is grand because when Molly hangs up the phone, she finds Sherlock sifting through her desk drawers.

"What are you doing?"

"Studying. Getting an angle on your story."

"Rummaging through my personal things?"

"And that. And waiting for you to finish up so we can get started."

"I was on the phone for five minutes."

He shrugs, and she suddenly understands that aggrieved look she's seen so often on John's face.

She understands it even more as the week progresses. It's a bit disorienting, spending this much time with a man she's idolized so long, especially considering that prolonged exposure reveals to her that he is not idol material.

They hold counsel...well, not really counsel, exactly. Counsel needs more than one person, and he is rigidly silent as to his own plans for the next stage of the ruse. Still, they spend the time going over and over her story, and it's collaboration to a point.

She had never realized how practiced Sherlock was at the art of deception. He slips in and out of dozens of characters, runs three times as many scenarios. ("You need to be prepared for questions from anybody and everybody," he insists, when she expresses confusion at why he's quizzing her in the character of a cabbie.) He coaches her on her tone, facial expressions, and eye contact—the story itself, in its bare bones, being what John "witnessed," Sherlock dead from an unsurvivable leap.

"Not enough eye contact—you want their attention riveted on you like you're a magician performing a sleight of hand trick…no, no, no, that's too much, the only time you keep eye contact that long and intently is when you're talking to a mortal enemy or a lover." She blushes and he sighs. "We have to work on that, too. You blush far too easily; people will know you're hiding something."

"It's automatic," she protests. "I can't help it."

"You'll have to think of a cover story."

"I have one."

He waits, but she tilts her chin stubbornly and meets his eyes defiantly (but only for five seconds).

"Fine, we'll come back to that." He leans back and squints at her like a painter stepping away from his latest masterpiece. "Try to manage a flood of tears now and then."

"That won't be difficult."

"Really?" he asks dubiously.

"You'll be gone." She blushes again, and her eyes well up.

"Yes!" he exclaims. "Precisely like that. Pull that out and you'll be able to convince John Watson himself."

She hides her face in her hands.

"Don't overdo it."

Molly tries to think of something to change the subject, but all she can muster is a tack she's taken dozens of times since the fall at St. Bart's. "What if somebody else sees the body? What if they look and then they know that…."

He throws himself dramatically against the back of the armchair. "'What if pigs grew wings and flew to Mars?' They _won't_ look, for the same reason I wouldn't have looked had it been a corpse you had identified for me were I an easily duped investigator in an open-and-shut case. They trust you."

Sometimes it's hard to work out if Sherlock is being insulting or complimentary. She chooses once more not to read too much into it either way, which so far has helped to keep her balanced enough to put up with him.

"Besides," he adds, "it won't be the first time he's been mistaken for me."

Of course. "The ambassador's daughter."

He looks surprised. "You knew about that case?"

She knows about all his cases. She knows about his favorite sonatas and his penchant for nicotine and his grudging tolerance of felines (or at least of Toby). She knows that his landlady has a bad hip and that the drugs bust at his place a couple years ago wasn't entirely without precedent. She knows he doesn't talk about the things he doesn't want to talk about, and she knows he hadn't been about to talk about the case.

"Let's go back to rehearsals," she says. "Or practicing, or running lines, or whatever you like to call it."

He nods and angles his head up. His eyes go hard.

"I always said he'd go over the edge, but I never thought it'd be this literal."

The nervous giggle that started to build at his uncanny impression of Sgt. Donovan turns to a queasy feeling before it has a chance to bubble over.

"That's not funny." She's talking to him, but he continues as Donovan and she remembers how brutal he is.

"That's right, you were one of his mates, weren't you? Close as he got, anyway? Must be rough on you and poor John Watson, believing in a fraud all this time."

"He wasn't a fraud." She isn't supposed to be defending him too vigorously. "He…he was a good man. Almost. I mean…he was…."

"A kidnapper, and almost a murderer, and a psychopath, Molly. Just be thankful you didn't get in his way before things turned."

"You think he kidnapped the ambassador's children?"

"Donovan's" eyes narrow. "How do you know about the ambassador case?"

Molly sighs impatiently. "That's not fair, Sher…."

"How do you know?"

Molly flings her hands in the air. "I work with the department, I hear all sorts of things."

"You keep track of him." It isn't a question.

"'Kept,'" Molly corrects. "And yes. Not always. This case. Kidnapping, I mean, it was wretched, wasn't it? You're really sure it was him?"

"Positive."

She is getting closer. "Were the children able to ID him, then?"

"The girl wouldn't stop screaming. Near enough to an ID."

And there it is, a flash of genuine loathing in his eyes.

"He would've hated that," she says softly.

"Please. Like he'd ever care what some kid beneath his notice thought of him."

"He was human," protests Molly. "Wasn't he?"

Sherlock claps his hands abruptly, dropping the Donovan persona. "Much better. Time for a break."

She stands with him and grabs his sleeve as he turns to leave. "It_ wasn't_ you. It was never you."

He shakes his head.

"You _are_ everything I think you are." She leans in to catch his eye. "And I think you're a great man, Sherlock Holmes. A great man, and a good one." Then she lets him stalk off to the guest bedroom, because he is everything she thinks he is, and he is not the sort for tea and sympathy.

She hopes that in this round of training, they've both managed to learn something.


	6. Flatshare

Living with Sherlock is a horrible thing. John had not been misleading her when he had said his flatmate's orderliness of mind did not translate into the physical realm. He never washes a dish, never even leaves it near the sink—one afternoon on the way to collect the post, she trods on a cup of tea that had been left just inside the front door.

His moods swing maniacally between opposite poles. The day the newspapers report Jim Moriarty never existed, his grin nearly splits his face, and he actually grabs her by the hand and twirls her around. The next day, as she readies for his funeral, he is in a deep depression. At least the latter makes some sense to her.

She asks him how she looks—in the habitual way of a woman in company who is otherwise fully able to decide that for herself—before realizing he'd never really cared and sensing the absurdity of asking someone how she looked for his own funeral.

"Fine," he pronounces, without raising his eyes.

"I wish you were coming, too," she says, piling on the absurdity. "That is…."

He nods. They share an opinion that if Sherlock must have a funeral, the best person to be absent from it is the man himself.

Still, it's hard to see John's ashen face, to return Mrs Hudson's sympathetic hug, to know whose corpse is actually being buried in that grave, and to bear it all alone. Molly does not have to fake her tears.

"How was it?" he asks upon her return. "Heartwarming, I'd gather, from the state of your eyes and the number of tissues you went through."

She looks down at her bag, can't see any way he would see how many tissues she'd removed from the interior, and doesn't feel like asking. "You had to be there," she says, and shakes her head. "Never mind." She shrugs off her coat and tosses it onto a chair. "I'm a bit peckish. You?"

"No."

She isn't surprised. She hasn't seen the man eat anything the whole week.

"Couldn't eat a bite at the luncheon, no matter how much Mrs Hudson pressed me to. John wasn't that much better. They miss you."

"That's irrelevant."

"You look sad again."

"Also irrelevant."

"It isn't," she says, but doesn't stay around to argue the point. She can't wait to change out of the clothes she wore to the funeral. They feel tainted. Once she is finished hanging up her coat and changing her clothes and brushing her hair out and washing her face, she can look in the mirror and not hate herself so much. She hopes.

Her tasks complete, she heats up a serving of salmon from the night before and brings it to the kitchen table.

"Only one plate?"

She stops short, hovering halfway between standing and sitting. She had been making up two plates all week, but he'd never expressed the slightest interest in them.

"You said you weren't hungry. No point in offering you dinner and watching it go cold. Again."

A wry smile comes over his face.

"Was I wrong? Did you…."

"No, no, you're quite right." He walks over and pulls out a chair.

"Should I get another…."

He waves a hand dismissively. "Not hungry. But I can be sociable."

"You can? I'm sorry, I just meant…you _can_?"

"I'm dead. I can do anything."

Living with Sherlock is a horrible thing.

She will treasure it forever.


	7. Goodbye

She drives towards Portsmouth with him wedged into the boot of a rental car. Choosing that car nearly led to a bout of hysteria as she checked one boot after another, trying to envision which would be the least miserable for her six foot comrade to coil inside. Despite all her anxiety, when it comes to it, he installs himself as fluidly as though he is accustomed to riding around the country like this, and when he extricates himself he barely even stretches.

"Thank you, Molly," he says as she hands him the case from the back seat. "Your help has been invaluable."

"I can come with you," she blurts out.

He tilts his head ever so slightly in a way she has come to recognize. It's what he does when he's confronted with a reaction that flies in the face of his brand of logic. Molly has gotten that head tilt a lot.

"I—I hate to think of you out there all alone."

"Alone protects…." He trails off, and if he weren't Sherlock Holmes, she would think he couldn't make himself finish the sentence.

"Protects us," she says. "Protects your friends. I know. But who's going to protect you?"

"I would say it doesn't matter, except you would only say it does. Suffice it to say..." He shrugs. "Pick a comforting cliché, pretend I said it, _you_ need to be on your way if you're to avoid suspicion."

"Where will you go? Will I…will we ever see you again?"

"It's best if you can't answer those questions."

She reaches out a hand for him to shake, and he throws his arms around her in a bear hug instead. Again she is reminded of her father, because this hug feels like goodbye forever. She doesn't cry, but can't help a sharp intake of breath and a bit of a shaky exhale. She is glad they've stopped on a dark country lane, where he's less likely to see her face properly. In case he would, for a change.

"Keep an eye on them," he says quietly. "Lestrade. Mrs Hudson. And…."

"I will," she interrupts, so he won't have to finish.

"Good girl," he responds, drops a brief kiss on the top of her head, and then he backs away, picks up his case, tips his cap to her, and sets off down the road towards the port.

On the drive back she braces herself for the long lie ahead. She feels guilty for not feeling worse about the prospect, but acting as his co-conspirator has brought her unexpectedly close to him. There are only four she will hate to lie to (she includes Mycroft, though she suspects Sherlock doesn't), and perversely, the thought makes her glow with contentment.

He will never love her in the ordinary way, and she may never see him again, but she is on the short list of people he cares about.

It counts.


End file.
